The Desire of Horror

31. Out of Darkness

What is Otherness? Out of Darkness 2022 directed by Andrew Cumming fits into a number of horror categories, but we've decided to do it on our nature horror series. When we were kids back in the 80s, there were two bizarro movies about early hominids, Quest for Fire and the Clan of the Cave Bear. Both have proved to be quite incompatible with more recent paleo-anthropological findings. Many of those fallacies have been cleared up to great effect in Out of Darkness. The two most glaring of these mistakes were that Neanderthals weren't capable of the advanced symbolic behaviors of Homo Sapiens, and that there was no interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals because they were too genetically different to reproduce. Since that time, archeological evidence has shown that Neanderthals did participate in symbolic activities such as art, language, and religious practices, and genetic markers have proved that they did interbreed with Homo Sapiens. Out of Darkness is a story about human immigration and confrontation with the Other, and in true horror fashion, it asks who is the monster when otherness is encountered? As different as Neanderthals were, they were human. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

30. Annihilation

We get deep into the weird genetic refractions of Alex Garland's very loose take on Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Area X seems to be a place of infinite possibilities, except for the possibility of remaining untouched by the mysterious, churning flows of organic codes that produce mixed bodies of unknowable intention. What is the intention of this alien presence in what seems to be a swamp somewhere on the Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico? Maybe, it doesn't have one. Join us as we think about the human proclivity for self-destruction, the ambiguity of identity, and how the intentions of organic bodies arise from the non-intention of inorganic processes. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

29. Outbreak and The Bay

In this special double feature addition of the Desire of Horror, Marty's sister Andrea joins the duo once again for a discussion of Outbreak (1995) directed by Wolfgang Peterson and The Bay (2012) directed by Barry Levinson. Char presents her wealth of horror movie references while Andrea brings her science background to this special episode. Andrea worked for a company that produced Covid test kits among other medical products during the height of the Covid pandemic. She reports that military escorts were sometimes necessary for transporting these materials as well as other extreme, security measures. As intense as the outbreaks in Outbreak and The Bay were, they were in some ways less intense than the Covid pandemic that they seemed to presage. Andrea gives a scientific analysis of these two movies that were retroactively considered harbingers of what was to come in 2020 from her background in contagious diseases. The main difference between fact and fiction seems to be the far greater fatality numbers of the Covid pandemic than fictional portrayals of pandemics had imagined.  Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

Special Episode: Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix

Char and I cross over from our normally audio-only Desire of Horror Podcast to produce this Youtube video. We discuss the book Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix. https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfso [https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfso] The book provides a somewhat obvious but nonetheless useful capitalist critique around the concepts of the Professional Managerial Class or corporate speak; Consumer Culture, especially influencer advertisement techniques; and the toxic positivity of constant "self-maximization." An Ikea-like furniture store is built on the past site of a particularly ignominious prison, and the spirit of its warden and his prisoners emerge from within the vast, deliberately disorientating halls of the "Orsk" furniture store to haunt its circulating corridors, which are already haunted by the gaze of capital and consumption. The former prison was one of Jeremy Bentham's infamous "Panopticons." A Panopticon was a prison designed to require minimal guards because the prisoners always had the sense that they were being watched by the guards who were placed in a watch tower in the middle of the prison complex, so that they were able to see the maximal number of cells from their vantage point. The Panopticon serves as a fruitful metaphor throughout the novel as the horror of the ineluctable, internalized gaze of the Lacanian "Big Other," which for horror fans is something like the incubus always speaking from inside of the possessed's head. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

27. Frozen

Three, vanilla, college kids get stuck in a ski lift chair high above some undisclosed, New England slopes, as a winter storm rolls in. While they're up there, they argue about stuff like their bizarre love triangle dynamic, which doesn't really help make being stuck in a ski lift chair for a long-ass time any more interesting since it's some typical teenager, third-wheel, after-school-special BS. The severe compound fracture that one of them gets trying to jump off the chair lift is gnarly but not that interesting either..., until that dude gets eaten by small "wolves" that are probably just regular dogs, which were, perhaps, a responsible fiscal decision given the movie's modest budget. This logistical practicality is a little bit interesting, but only a little, perhaps, because the affordable "wolves" were midsized dogs and kind of cute.  Being mauled by standard-issue dogs that were painted to look like vicious wolves and shot with some sort of shadowy strobe effect from low angles to make them seem darker and bigger than average-sized, domesticated, well-lit dogs might be interesting, but the camera doesn't show it because we are told not to look at the mauling by the two remaining, vanilla, college kids stuck in a ski lift chair..., presumably because it would be too traumatic to see their best friend eaten alive by the one or two, well-trained but otherwise mediocre dogs that were actually on the set but shot to seem as if they were a wild and multitudinous pack of gigantic, drooling beasts. After the artfully obscured but budgetary, except for whatever was spent on the pricey-sounding, crunchy bone audio used throughout the movie, mauling that we are left to imagine from the two teenagers closed eyes and some random, half-eaten, special-effects department, body parts strewn around in the snow, there's some uninteresting but tense conversation around who was responsible for that dude jumping out of the chair and promptly getting mauled. Later there's some more uninteresting but tense dialog around not touching their frostbitten faces because their noses will fall off if they're not careful. Join us to find out if they're able to resist touching their frost-bitten faces and how the movies manages to add up to something sort of enjoyable to watch even though its not composed of many promising elements.  Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram